Literature and Propaganda

For a thinker like Kierkegaard, however, as a recent book has shown us, language is not truer than immediacy, and the loss of the latter in the act of expressing it leads to the mistaking of 'reality as represented' for 'reality as reality', even as consciousness, for the most part, is unaware of this duplicity

The direct--needled-adrenalin to the heart... of the Garifuna music. Why, what makes this impossible... from where I am?
I have a beer in a neighborhood bar. Watch the TV (don't own one)... and I sort of get it.
We live in the virtual equivalent of a Stalinist state. Yeah, I know--they don't (usually) come knocking on our doors in the middle of the night...if we're not the wrong sort of immigrants. They don't grab us on the street... if we're white, or properly middle class, suit-and-tie-professional blacks... but what we say, what we write.... they come for that, without our even seeing it.

They come. They confiscate. They use.

They turn whatever turns-on the popular mind... into an ad.

What did they do... in Poland, 1952? Czechoslovakia, 1957? Writers, artists--who wanted to assert themselves?

They learned to subvert the language in order to preserve it. They learned the art of indirection.

We live in--for all the superficial openness... if not for all--in as oppressive and mind-stifling a social and political environment as Prague, 1957.

No, we don't get hauled off and sent to Siberia (most of us... if we're the right sort )... but they don't need to do that.

Just make an ad... of anything. And it will do.

And you're on their side.

The problem then, if you want to write and think freely... on the one hand, you can make your ideas so complicated that only other philosophers will understand them... or care.

On the other?

Perhaps there is no more important task for a writer--in the heart of the Empire, the belly of the beast--than understanding in every detail, in all its subtle crudity, the rhetoric of received notions. And the application for the propagandists of power.

How? to avoid them.

How?

... to defy
syntax, grammar, "logic" ... in the name of reclaiming...

syntax... grammar... logic.

The difficulty takes different forms in prose and poetry. For poetry, we confront this on a more basic linguistic level. In prose, in story telling... it's the syntax of narrative itself--one step up.

Storytelling... how to tell a story... a story, not an ad? That can't become an ad? ... or if not that, with sufficient subversive power to undermine and scramble the kidnapped message?

5 comments:

Hi Jacob, I'm not sure that I think ads are totally bad. I suppose I naively believe there can be "ads with integrity". After all, we all need to sell ourselves in some way. Selling out seems to be the human condition. And thanks for the link - always good to hear new voices and non-commercial music. Cheers, pete

A story, a painting, a poem... is more and other than a commodity. What we trade and sell in marketing a book is not the work, but the market value assigned to it.

Dali didn't draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa. He drew a mustache on a debased public icon.

If the work itself is used as nothing more than an ad its real value is obscured, made more difficult to by the mask of the public icon it's been made to serve. It's not the ad per se--it's the public icon that replaces the work.

I realize this is an all consuming fear that writers have, but the truth is advertising can only appropriate a very limited range of literary realities, past and current; as it can only utilize and distort a sampling of music. The pervasiveness of the mediums of advertising are no way in themselves instrinicly powerful, and wilt like plastic in the heat when faced with either real speech or literature. That's what I think.

There's nothing that can't be put to "use." The problem is not to find a mode of speech that can't be kidnapped and sold on the market, but to write, as I said, "with sufficient subversive power to undermine and scramble the kidnapped message"

There's nothing that can't be put to "use." The problem is not to find a mode of speech that can't be kidnapped and sold on the market, but to write, as I said, "with sufficient subversive power to undermine and scramble the kidnapped message"

Ads are not the best example. Television has favored a brand of commercial irony--where there is minimal effort to convey information beyond the naming of the brand itself. The idea, I suppose, is to come right to the edge--where the irony doesn't quite erase the associational message (drinking brand X makes the babes melt in your mouth).

Were the Burma Shave ads the prototype for TV? Name association alone apart content.